The Last Gig

Heroes don’t get into the jizz biz. Heroes become doctors and do heart transplants or get into the Marines and kick ass. Me, I’m just a pornographer, a director to be exact. I used to be the head bouncer at a titty bar named Rock Candy Mountain. When the owner Hernando started using the strippers in amateur porn movies he hired me as the director. Director was a fancy title for handing out wads of Hernando’s cash, making sure everybody fucked right and keeping an eye open to make sure that no asshole walked off with the lights or the camera.

Pretty easy gig, same shit as being a bouncer, but a little less black and white. Porn, consenting adults fucking in front of a camera, is legal but so is jacking off and you don’t hear people bragging at the dinner table about what great hand jobs they give themselves. You keep it to yourself and so do the actresses. Actresses, hell, they’re strippers, a little down on their luck or their looks, or a little later in their careers. Strippers are pack animals, like canines. You pee on them and they respect you, think you’re the big swinging dick, the alpha. Like I said, easy. Or at least it should be. Same as the actresses, the strippers, I got into flake. Made the days more exciting, the nights too. Cunts and dicks. Cunts and dicks. It gets fucking repetitive. Flake puts a shine on it, keeps your spirits up.

The big perk of being a porn director is getting to fuck the girls. Big surprise. But flake helps there too, having a nice snort or smoke helps sweeten the deal, wake a young lady up after a long, and pardon my French, hard day. The problem is, flake’s expensive. Especially when you’re the life of the party, turning on all these boob-jobs every day. So you work more and that’s not enough. So you work sleazier. In porn, just like in regular business, sleaze pays. The worse the garbage, the more you have to pay someone to get rid of it.

I split from Hernando and started working for this Costa Rican outfit that ran its business out of Miami. They called themselves Imagination, Inc. and they specialized in make-believe. Fake rape scenes, cute stuff like that. But cash, and plenty of it, in a blank envelope right after the shoot finishes. All top secret, chartered planes to random places, fake names or no names, but always big chunks of cash, and once they learned my fondness for it, a not so small triangle of flake thrown in to boot.

The girl I’m looking at has no name but the most beautiful lips I’ve ever seen, like they’re carved from raspberry sherbet and above them are two gorgeous blueberry blue eyes, contacts I’m sure. And these eyes are brimming with tears.

She’s stark naked, was when I walked into the room a minute ago with Desmond, the Haitian cameraman who came with me on the Cessna from Miami. She’s holding on to the ropes that are tied to the corners of the four-poster bed. It gives the illusion that she’s tied to the bed. It’s to be a fake rape – some guy will fuck her with a prop gun pushed against her head. She’ll pretend to scream her head off and I’ll get back on the plane to Miami with ten grand in my pocket. Not bad for a days work. Just a little extra grime on the soul, nothing a snootful of boo and a bottle of Johnnie Black won’t wash away.

“You speak Spanish?” I say to Desmond. He shrugs as he’s setting up the camera. “Tell her she’s going to be fine.”

“You do, mon,” he says. “You de big boss wallah.”

“Right,” I say and shake a fat bump onto my knuckle. I snort it up and wait for my head to clear. “Shit. How do you say fake?”

“Falso,” says Desmond.

So I try to explain to her that the gun, el pistola, will be fake, falso. It pushes my crap Spanish to the very limit and I don’t think she’s getting it.

I motion to her. “Let go of the ropes and walk away,” I say. “Vamos. It’s a free country.”

“This one no is,” says Desmond.

I walk over to her and pull on one of her hands and realize with a sick feeling that the knots are real.

“Ai, Chihuahua!” says a high-pitched voice from the back of the room.

I turn and see two real deal looking Mexican circus clowns. One has a big orange smile painted on his face, the other has a bright blue frown. They have cherry red bulb noses and wear matching tuxedo shirts, short-legged checkered pants, and tiny pork-pie hats held in place by chin strings. They also each carry a snub-nosed .38 Special. About as non-prop as a gun can be, these nasty little revolvers fire a hollow-point round that cops call Showstoppers. It’ll punch a grapefruit worth of guts out anybody stupid enough to get shot with one.

The Happy Clown motions me away from the girl with his pistol. I back away, get to Desmond and then stop, take my balls out of my purse and hold up my hand. I’m bigger than both of these freaks put together and goddamnit I’m the director.

I give them my best bouncer stare, the stare of sharp ice. They stare back and then they start laughing. It’s an eerie, high-pitched Mexican clown laugh like coyotes on speed. It makes my butthole pucker. I look over at Desmond. He’s turned whiter than me.

As they continue to laugh, I stare at them and turn over my options in my head. I can hear the girl whispering, or praying, in fear. Now is my big Popeye moment, my moment to show the world who I really am. This is when I gulp the spinach, reach out and grab the clowns by their pork-pie hats and bang their evil heads together. Their eyes spin in circles, bluebirds fly tweeting around their heads and they pass out cold on the ground. The music swells as I cut the girl loose with my broadsword and sail off into the sunset with her kissing my cheeks in adoration. Tick tock. The moment passes. Like a record needle being lifted up, the clowns quit laughing. Squeak. Silence.

The Sad Clown drops his pants revealing a big hard on. He looks over at me.

“Action!” he says in English and snaps his fingers. Desmond starts taping, the red tally light on the top of the camera flickering away. The Sad Clown walks over and takes up a position next to the girl’s head. He takes the tip of the gun and rubs it against the girl’s perfectly shaped nipple. She squirms and stares at naked Happy Clown in horror. I watch helplessly as he pulls himself onto the bed, and gun still clenched in one hand, sticks his big dick into the struggling, now screaming, girl.

The Sad Clown watches the girl scream and begins his high-pitched clown laugh as the other, the rapist, begins to laugh too. They match pitch with the girl’s screaming, an eerie, chilling union of cackling monkey laughter and desperate shrieks of pain and humiliation.

I look out the open window at the jungle and wonder if someone might hear screams but I know they won’t. We’re at a run-down shack at the end of a dirt trail twenty minutes from the tiny dirt air strip where the Cessna landed. I don’t even know what country we’re in, if we’re even in a country at all. It could just be this shack and a patch of jungle-covered island in the middle of the ocean.

The Happy Clown groans, pulls out and comes on the girl’s tits. He gets off the bed, pulls his pants up and changes places with the Sad Clown. The Sad Clown walks to the other side of the bed and puts his gun down next to the girl. He then pulls down his pants, revealing an average-sized limp penis.

The Sad Clown climbs up on the bed, grabs the girl by her raven hair, and pulls her head towards his crotch.

“Suck it,” he says in English. The girl takes his dick into her mouth and sucks on it. Suddenly, she bears her teeth and bites down. The Sad Clown bellows and the girl kicks her legs, knocking the pistol off the side of the bed onto the floor. I dive for it and hear a crash and then a muffled shot. I grab the gun and slide under the bed. On the other side of the bed, I see the Happy Clowns’ feet backing away from me. I pull the trigger twice and blow his ankles off. He falls on the ground and I put a third round through his screaming mouth.

I push out from under the bed and jump back on my feet. The Sad Clown is still bellowing, his dick clamped in the girl’s teeth. When she sees me with the smoking gun, she bites down and tears the Sad Clown’s dick off. Blood geysers out of his crotch and he hardly seems to notice when she spits his dick at him and it bounces off his chest. He slumps down against the wall and passes out. I look over and see Desmond lying on the ground. He’s dead, shot through the face. The camera and tripod are lying smashed against the far wall. I guess when I went for the gun, Desmond threw the whole rig at the Happy Clown. Desmond probably saved my life.

I untie the girl and dress her in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt I had in my backpack. She speaks a little English and she tells me she was kidnapped two days ago. She’s from a little village in the mountains of Costa Rica. The blue eyes are real.

Before we leave, I take the other gun and pull the tape from the video camera. We walk the trail back to the airstrip. It’s slow going. She’s barefoot and I have to carry her most of the way. I find out her name is Maria.

When we get to the airstrip, I find the pilot sleeping on a blanket in the shade of the plane’s wing. When I wake him up, he says, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

I ask him where my envelope is and he tells me there is no envelope. I figure it out then. I wasn’t supposed to come back from this gig. The gravy train had ended. The Clowns were going to shoot me as soon as they finished with girl and Imagination, Inc. would hire a new coke head to do their dirty work.

“You’re flying us back,” I say to the pilot.

“I have to call in to check what to do,” he says.

“Bullshit,” I say and pull the pistol out of my pocket to make my point.

Back in Miami, I have a meeting with Imagination, Inc. They are unhappy to see me. The conversation is brief. I give them the tape. They give me two million in cash on the promise that I’ll disappear along with the girl. So we disappeared. I can’t tell you where we are but it’s got palm trees, blue skies and drinks that come in coconuts. Money doesn’t buy happiness but it does give you the down payment. It’s the best early retirement a pornographer could ask for.

I’m a writer and filmmaker here in Los Angeles. I recently did a movie for
Showtime called Easy Six starring Julian Sands and Jim Belushi.

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